Raphael Carter - The Fortunate Fall

“You’re right, though,” she said when she turned back to me. “It started in Africa. I went there on Weaver business—spying, I mean. Half our tech came from Africa, one way or another. But this time, I was looking for an edge. Something to keep me a step ahead of them, something that the other Weavers wouldn’t have. Do you remember what you called it?”

I did; but I would not be drawn out.

“The Cone of Silence,” she said, searching my face for a smile.

“And you found it,” I said flatly.

“No. I searched all through the Net, and all through the streets, and I couldn’t find anything the Weavers didn’t already have. I had to pack up and get on the airship home, thinking, this is it, I’ll have to give her up now. At least that way I’d be able to remember you.

“And then suddenly I was cut off from the Net, as I hadn’t been in years: something was locking me into my skull. In the next seat was a man I hadn’t seen before. He was hideous—wounds boiled over his face as I watched, and there was a hunger in his eyes that I was afraid to look at. And then I looked again, and he was perfect, young, beautiful, streaming with light. It was a manifestation of His-Majesty-in-Chains.”

“The Page of Wounds,” Voskresenye said acerbically. “We may perceive His Majesty’s respect for Weavers from the fact that he did not even bother to send one of the Major Arcana.”

Still harping on Tarot. Cigan? And all his predictions a wanderer’s trick, with neurons instead of tea leaves?

She ignored him and continued. “‘I know who you are, Weaver,’ he said to me. ‘I have been watching you since you came here, and indeed long before that, for there is nothing on the Net I do not watch. Your ostensible mission is not significant enough for me to even bother thwarting, but your secret wish requires of me a generous response.’

“‘What do you want?’ I asked.

“‘Nothing that you can give,’ he said, and the pain in his eyes bored into me. ‘Take your freedom. It is no less than you deserve.’ And he began to raise his hands.

“Then he stopped and said thoughtfully, ‘But, you know…’” She shook her head, sighing. “His Majesty will kill you with the ‘But, you know.’ ‘If you like,’ he said, ‘I could show you what your hiding means. You are a Weaver, after all; if anyone could change things in the Fusion, it would be you. Would you care to see some of the consequences of your actions?’

“‘No,’ I told him.

“He laughed at that. ‘Very wise,’ he said. ‘No one knows better than I why it is easier to be ignorant.’ Blood was seeping into his shirt, and wounds opened like mouths in his hands. ‘But I do not permit myself that luxury. And you are a god in the Net, as much as I am. I will no more allow it to you.’”

“‘I don’t want your gifts,’ I said.

“He ignored me. ‘ Know, ’ he said. ‘And after that, if you can turn away, then turn away.’ He lifted his hands to my temples, and then he was gone.

“Strapped into my seat on the African airship, his words burning through me, I hallucinated for seven hours. He had put me into the head of another Weaver, the one whose kibo is lesbianka. I traveled with her through the Net—but not as it was then; in the future. In the Net as it is now.”

She lowered her head, closing her eyes briefly, then looked back up with an expression of forced calm. “She’s not one of the cruel ones, you know. She’s only trying to do her job. You’re lying there, next to the woman that you love, and trying to think when you can be with her again. You touch the Net to see your schedule. And there’s a sound of wings. The Weaver comes to you, and looks down at you lying there. You’re clutching the bedsheets against your chest and groping for your clothes, and the body that felt so warm and comfortable has now become so monstrous and so vulnerable that if you could, you would discorporate on the spot. She says to you, very gently, ‘Well, I guess we have a problem.’ And she offers you the choice. You can forget. Or you can remember, at the price of being hidden from the Net forever.

“Not many people have the courage to choose excommunication,” she said. “And even if you do, she doesn’t let you keep what you were. She touches your forehead with the back of her hand, and says, ‘Don’t worry. You’re cured now.’ You look over at the woman lying beside you, and think, what did I ever feel for her? And you go on that way, remembering, but not remembering why —quite cured of the capacity to love.

“By the time I got to Leningrad,” she said. “I’d seen her do it to a hundred women, and any one of them could have been you. His Majesty was right. He’d put the means of fighting it in my hands, and as desperately as I wanted to, I couldn’t turn away.”

“What did he give you?” I asked.

“He didn’t give me anything,” she said. “He took something away: the Russian language.”

“Why?”

“Because knowing human languages protects the mind from Sapir. That’s why the Africans are so far ahead—don’t you see? They don’t get their Sapir from a fluency chip. They get their first brainmod at one year, and learn it as a first language. It’s the lingua franca of their continent, and that makes all the difference. The first computer languages were pidgins, formed the same way any pidgin is formed, by a dominant race thrusting its words onto the grammar of a subordinate one. Then with KRIOL, the pidgin acquired native speakers. In Sapir the tables are turned—it changes human thought to fit computers, not the other way around. But the language instinct fights tooth and nail against Sapir, and if you teach the child a human language too early, the mind hedges.

“Here in the Fusion, the Weavers won’t let anyone but themselves speak Sapir without a chip—it would give the people too much power. But even Weavers learn it late in life. They don’t think that makes a difference, but it does. Not enough, as it turned out, but there’s a difference. His-Majesty-in-Chains burned away the Russian language from my mind, so that Sapir could do its work. And when I got to the trainport, even my own memories were in a foreign language—how could I possibly remember dialogue that wasn’t imprinted with compass orientation, time of day, and ambient temperature? I had to call up a translation program from the Net, just so I could write you a message to tell you I’d come home.”

She laid her hand on the samovar. “Maya, I have to tell you… it was my fault, what happened to us. If I’d used all my skill to hide you, we would have been safe. But after what His Majesty showed me, I couldn’t do that. I knew what was coming, and I couldn’t turn away.”

“But you didn’t tell me?” I said.

“No. If I failed and they found you, you’d be a lot better off not knowing. It was my responsibility, and I wanted the consequences to be on my head.”

She was hoping for forgiveness. I made my face a mask. “What did you do?” I said.

“I tried to change the filters in the Net. That’s where ninety percent of the work is done, you know. If I knocked out the filters, and kept them knocked out, then the Weavers and screeners wouldn’t have a chance.”

She laughed, shaking her head. “It was a hell of a plan, on paper. But I should have known. His Majesty had made me like an African, sure. But if one African could liberate the world, wouldn’t it have happened a long time ago? Obvious, right? But somehow that line of reasoning escaped me.

“So I went a little way, and it was easy. I got confident. I pushed further and further. At some point I was detected, and I didn’t even know it.

“And somehow they found you. They must have followed me in reality, that’s all I can figure. I’d hidden you from the Net so well I thought they’d never find you—after all, who thinks of Weavers wearing out actual shoe leather, and all that Sam Spade kind of shit? All the time I was a Weaver, I never heard of such a thing. But I guess when one of their own turned coat, they took it personally. So they followed me and found you. Then they waited, I suppose, to see if I would lead them to any more accomplices. But no, it was only you. And then one day they got me—just as I was about to walk in the door.”